Critical Essay by Deborah Cohn

SOURCE: Cohn, Deborah. “‘The Paralysis of the Instant’: The Stagnation of History and the Stylistic Suspension of Time in Gabriel García Márquez's La hojarasca.” College Literature 26, no. 2 (spring 1999): 59-78.

In the following essay, Cohn explores García Márquez's treatment of linear time in Leaf Storm and notes the influence of William Faulkner, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf on the novel.

Gabriel García Márquez's first novel, La hojarasca (1955), has often been deemed “too Faulknerian,” and García Márquez himself criticized for not yet having developed a voice of his own, differentiated from that of the southerner.1 To be sure, García Márquez's early journalistic...